that same day in october

i can't tell you how crazy i drive myself. i am constantly trying to convince martin of how hard it is to be me. i'm serious. like, how can i be so excited about attending jonathan canlas's film is not dead workshop, back in october, which i wrote about here, but not have blogged all the pictures from it/ its MAY, for pete's sake. i'm terribly annoyed with myself. so that's what this and the family post before it are. also, i want to world to know that although i love the sweetness of may, october is my most favorite month. its gorgeous and invigorating, with the mildest tinge of something sad. every thing about october is bittersweet nostalgia for me. it is my birth month, and i sincerely felt like my FIND experience lead to a bit of rebirth as an artist...

you'll notice in these images a lack of eye contact, due to the group shooting conditions. but if you want the truth,  i kind of  prefer it that way.

COMING TO BOISE!

hey everyone, we are coming to boise for a week from may 16th through the 21st, and are offering a very limited number of boise sessions at that time (and yes, we are offering regular family sesisons, as well as engagement, love shoots, or a shoot of just your small, precious ones). please email me immediately if you would like to do a lovely spring session. photography.yan@gmail.com

bright

can i tell you why i love to do simple sessions one more time? why i so much want you and your family to come and spend a half hour or so in the studio with me? for me the simplified location (white, white, white, one room, lots of light) really allows me to focus on how your family connects, how your family is together, without distractions. how you tickle--how you make each other laugh, how you move, the subtle way you position yourself in a room. and nothing distracts from that. marty and i created the kind of place that would foster memory making in the most natural way possible outside of your home. the goal, the hope is  to capture all the sorts of organic moments that you really will want to remember always. so we try and try, and its not always easy, because things never go "perfect." but that's really what makes things perfect in the end, isn't it? p.s.  at the end of this session i wanted to make this family my new best friends. bri is an awesome mama, photographer and blogger here. too bad they moved to st. louis for the summer. i'm so lucky they got a simple session in first.

see all photos from this event and order prints here.

sofia and her family

i would see that name pop up now and again on in the comments section on the blog  from my very first days as a photographer---the one i loved so much, the one i wished was my name. sofia. so pretty. sofia. i'm such a name person, and to me 'sofia,' feels soft, light, elegant, strong, and true. such a perfect combination of connotations. she was one of those people i friended from a distance--do you know what that's like? you know them, casually, through others maybe, or through some connection, but not really directly. still you think of them as someone you get along with, someone with whom you share a connection that's maybe never been acted on. the connection was in part this--sofia worked at the newspaper at byu-hawaii about the time i got hired. the newsroom had a computer with all of her music on it. she left soon after i started working there, and i took over that computer along with her itunes library. so so so many good bands. and also during our college's "guitars unplugged," event, sofia participated, while i watched shyly from the audience. she sang a song while playing the guitar (!!!!). with her eyes closed. i couldn't have adored her more.

then here she was a handful of years later, commenting on my blog, throwing bits of much appreciated support my way. she knew i was doing photography because she and her husband had developed a friendship with my sister in law, darcie and her husband. (all four of them are musicians  comprising the bands canoe, and adam and darcie, respectively,, and you should check out their beautiful music here). so when sofia contacted me and said they were coming from portland to ut, and would love some family pictures, my heart leaped. finally a chance to pay her back for all of those hours of listening to rad music.

(these photos are a mixture of digital and film. 5D mark ii, contax 645 and canon eos3, portra 400, fuji 400h).